


ditched at the heist

by Honora



Series: i need a hero (but not that one) [1]
Category: The Flash (TV 2014)
Genre: I don't know, M/M, an idea of what could happen with new meta-humans on the team, because she literally catches fire, if that's not his type i don't know what is, small one-sided Mick/Bea, sort of jealous!Len if you squint
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-06-26
Updated: 2015-06-26
Packaged: 2018-04-06 07:09:59
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,585
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4212615
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Honora/pseuds/Honora
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Crime fighting isn’t a company, and Barry isn’t anyone’s boss, but it’s possible he’s letting the interns do some of his work for him.</p><p>In which Barry Allen outsources his heroic activities (and interpersonal commitments) and <strike>feelings get hurt</strike> dignities are offended.</p>
            </blockquote>





	ditched at the heist

**Author's Note:**

> I have no idea what I was aiming for with this

One thing Barry had always wanted was to find friendly meta-humans they could work with instead of fight. This had been a goal from the very beginning, when he first learned there were others like him.

That doesn’t mean he’s ever actually planned or prepared for it, or imagined what it would be like in practical terms. And since every meta-human they’d ever encountered had been bent, one way or another, on causing as many problems as they could, to as many people as they could, with the single exception of Bette, that had never been a problem.

He hadn’t imagined it would be like this.

“Oh, come on!” Ralph pleads. “Let us take them!”

Bea pouts at him. “You never let us do anything fun.”

It’s not that Barry can’t work with other people. He likes to think he’s a fairly good team player, and he gets that in this business help isn’t only a luxury but a need; it’s not a job for one person (no matter how much Oliver tells himself otherwise).

The thing is, he isn’t used to being the more experienced person in the room. He’s not familiar with having the responsibility over other people, with taking the role of mentor. He’s never mentored anyone, on anything. Ever. He doesn’t know how to handle it right.

Oliver had been doing this long before he was. Ronnie had gotten pretty good at doing his thing on his own. Ray Palmer… well, he wasn’t asking for Barry’s input, anyway. It feels weird being looked up to.

Sometimes he forgets the Flash is a household name now, an established hero in his own right. Like it’s not really happening to him, a label that doesn’t stick right.

“I’m not comfortable letting you guys go alone,” he starts, and he feels like the boring parent, laying rules, ending plans. He feels like Joe must have when he and Iris were growing up, like he probably still feels. “The Rogues are dangerous, and you’ve barely started training-”

“But how are we supposed to learn if you never let us go out and help?” Bea fires back. Her hair is starting to burn, but he suspects it’s deliberate, not a loss of control. It’s hard to tell with Bea, but he figures they’re good until she starts spitting fire.

“Getting beaten into experience isn’t a good way to learn anything.”

Ralph raises an eyebrow at him. It stops a little over his hairline, which is still creepy to watch. “Isn’t that how you did it?”

“That’s a good point,” Cisco pipes up. “Also, they’re on the move again, so I’d say make up your minds fast.”

“Look,” Bea says, jumping from her perch at the table and affecting a reasonable tone. “You said you have a deal with these guys, yes? They don’t hurt innocent people,” she shrugs. “So it’s perfect! It’s – how do I put this? – a more even playing field.”

“But I could just go along and–”                              

“Yeah, no thanks,” Ralph rolls his eyes. “We tried that before and you took them down before we could do anything. ‘Sides, you can’t be there every time, Barry.”

It makes sense, it’s the worst part. Their arguments make sense, their  _yearning_ makes sense, it’s perfectly reasonable. But they’re his friends and his trainees, for lack of a better term, and the idea of sending them out alone unprotected it’s intensely unpleasant. He wonders if that’s how Oliver feels about Roy, and if so, how he stands it.

He looks at Caitlin, silently asking for advice. She’s the only one who’s been quiet the whole time.

She bites her lip and looks away before turning to him, her familiar reluctant expression in place. “It’s not the worst idea I ever heard, actually. I think they deserve a chance.”

Bea nods, pleased. “And anyway, you’re the Flash. Anything goes wrong and you can be there in  _literally_  two seconds.”

“1,42 milliseconds.”

“Ugh, whatever. So, are we good?”

They are  _not_ good; at least Barry isn’t. But there’s nothing else he can reasonably object to, and time is running out on them, so he gives in. Watches Bea be consumed in green flames and fly away, and Ralph follow her with giant steps on impossibly stretched legs, and stays there.

In his uniform, in the lab.

As a crime takes place.

“This is weird,” he whines. Cisco just waves at him.

“Pull up a chair, it passes. Let’s see what the newbies can do.”

                                                 

 

Miraculously, things go ok, which is wonderful for Barry’s nerves. Sure, Bea can burn too hot and Ralph can lose focus amid all the stretching, and the Rogues did escape in the end, but they’re good. They can handle themselves. And though the criminals ran, they did recover the loot, so that has to count for something. A little more time, some more opportunities to try themselves, and they could really become something.

And they  _do_ get them; it’s a relatively quiet month, which means very few to none wild meta-humans or code red villains pop up anywhere. Crime sticks to a mostly non-meta variety, and the most dangerous thing out there is the Rogues.

(Which is no small threat, of course, but they are bound by a code of honor that they do seem to be sticking to, which can happen to make a random petty criminal a bigger danger. They often don’t care who gets hurt, and only Barry can outrun bullets.)

Not that it’s a  _calm_  month. The Rogues, particularly, seem to be acting up, another heist closely following the one Bea and Ralph – Fire and Elongated Man, Cisco has settled on – foiled. But apparently, it’s not Barry’s concern for the time being; they insist to taking every crime themselves, claiming they might never get such good low risk training opportunities again. Barry is, effectively, being benched from criminal activity if it doesn’t involve super powers.

It sucks, at first. Because his friends are risking themselves, though that lessens when he sees how capable they are of watching their own (and each other’s) backs, but also because it’s so  _boring._ Barry  _likes_ crime fighting and being the Flash, and this compulsory step back grates at his nerves.

It comes to a point when Cisco and Caitlin have to ban him from the lab when Fire and EM are on the field, and his antsy behavior and helpful mentor advise (or so he’d imagined it) get in the way of their actual technical expertise.

And that’s when it starts sucking a little bit… less. Sure, it’s a pain that he’s cut from the support process – he now gets called in when a foe rates higher in danger levels, but if not he gets only a call letting him know Bea and Ralph are on it, and a call later to tell him how it went. And Cisco emails him all the footage and asks for his opinion. And he’s summoned to every team celebratory hang out, no arguments. And he usually gets a call, if not a personal visit, from both Bea and Ralph to let him know – in the smallest possible details – how it went down, thought they both have a tendency to aggrandize themselves a bit, comparing to the footage.

He can’t complain of feeling left out of the team, at least.

So, basically, he gets a lot of free time. He’d honestly forgotten what that was like. It’s one of the draining aspects of this gig, how much it takes from you. The need to be constantly ready to drop everything and work, regardless of you having plans or not. Except now Barry… doesn’t.

One night the Rogues try a heist at the Central City museum. Fire and Elongated Man are put on the job, and Barry and Iris go to a new sushi bar he’s been dying to try out.

Another night there’s a string of thefts targeting small business, and Barry and Felicity watch Inception via Skype and chat for hours.

Not much later the Rogues strike yet again, this time a bank job. Barry goes running just for the hell of it.

Only a few days after that and it’s the Rogues again, and it’s a weird level of activity for them, honestly. But he figures it’s their way of testing the limits of their new opponents, getting a feel of their tactics, acquiring knowledge. They keep getting chances to; Bea and Ralph remain consistently bad at keeping them locked up, when they manage to catch them at all. Barry can’t complain about it, however, given that he can’t claim much success in that either.

He and Joe binge watch the new season of Orange is the New Black.

“You know,” Joe begins with a casual voice that makes Barry eye him warily as Netflix loads the next episode. “All this free time. Would be a good moment to be dating, huh.”

“Are you hinting at something?”

Joe gives him a pointed look.

“Turncoat. You’re not supposed to mention my sad love life.”

“What about your new friend? Bea, right?”

“No way,” he says, emphatic, because while Bea flirts constantly and outrageously, it’s not particularly aimed at him so much as whoever she’s talking to. He used to think it was the only setting she  _had;_ now he thinks it’s just the default one she’s more comfortable with. “We’re not like that.”

“Yeah, I’ll give you that. From what I've seen, she’d eat you alive, anyway. No offense.”

Barry is offended. Not denying it, though.

“What about Ralph?”

“Are you just going to go over everyone I know?” Joe says nothing, but Barry knows that look. He sighs. “No. No way, even. I don’t see him like that at all.”

It’s true; Ralph is a great friend, and a brilliant mind in his own right, but Barry couldn’t be less romantically attracted to him if he tried.

“Besides, I think he’s straight. And he's got it bad for this girl,” the petite high society brunette from the ball they first met on, pursuing the same criminal. At least, he hadn’t stopped talking about her since.

Joe  _hmphs_  at him, which signals great displeasure. Barry and Iris are very good at reading Joe’s grunts, since sometimes he’ll only communicate through that, and meaningful glances.

“If you say so. But you know,” he says, taking a sip of his beer and leaning back, not looking at Barry at all. “I do want grandchildren someday.”

 _“Ugh,”_ Barry replies, and Joe laughs and laughs.

                                         

       

It’s only a couple of days later when Barry’s quiet morning at Jitters is interrupted in the most unlikely way, and yet somehow in this short period someone must have found a way to subtly alter the fabric of reality, because it’s the only way Barry can think of to explain what happened.

He’d been there, drinking hot chocolate, minding his own business, waiting for Linda to show up for their new once-every-month-ish-let’s-stay-friends date, when someone who was most definitely  _not_ Linda sat across from him.

And Barry had found himself facing an angry Captain Cold in civilian clothing.

He actually looks over his shoulder, instinctively, like Snart could somehow have the wrong person. Finding no one, he blinks at the glaring man in front of him, astonished.

“Hm,” he says, intelligently. “Hello?”

Reasonably, Barry knows it’s not  _that_ impossible, though it is  _improbable._ After all, he once tracked Snart down to one of his civilian hang outs himself, when need called for it. But it’s a million times stranger when it’s happening  _to_  you. And it looks odd that Snart would come after him like this after betraying him. Not that he’d come, Barry is sure the man has no shame or regret whatsoever, and all the guts required to do it.

But once would think he’d try for something more… persuasive. Barry doesn’t recall approaching him this pissed.

Snart doesn’t say anything. He seems content in piercing Barry with his eyes, for the moment.

“Can I help you?” He prompts.

Finally, Cold speaks, his voice low and mad. “What are you playing at?”

“Uh,” he cases the room again, this time looking for some sort of clue. “Sorry?”

“Are you taking a vacation? Is that it? Or did you just stop giving a shit?”

“What is this abou–?”

“You keep delegating  _your_ job to those  _people,_ ” Snart grounds out, and frowns at him. “Not  _cool_ , kid.”

“What the… Are you serious? You’re  _mad_ that I haven’t gone after you lately?” Barry feels his chin must be on the ground by now. “Do you know how weird that is?”

“You can’t stop being the Flash.”

“I’m  _not!_ ”

Snart gets up. “We have a deal,” he says, very mysteriously, because Barry remembers that deal and last he checked there was no clause that demanded Barry was the one to personally pursue the Rogues every time they broke the law. “Next time I set a challenge,  _be there._ And leave the losers at home.”

And with that he leaves.

“What?” Barry calls after him anyway. But Snart doesn’t reply, and no hidden sense reveals itself, though he waits, staring dumbly at nothing for a good two minutes, minimum.

Eventually, he wakes up enough to stop a waitress.

“Excuse me, this is weird, but you saw a man here, right? Talking to me, left fast?” At her wary confirmation he nods. “Right, okay. Sorry, I had to check.”

The entire staff sends him odd glances until he leaves, but he had to be sure.

                                                 

 

Linda arrives soon after, and he wants to pay attention to her, he really does. But the weirdness of the preceding encounter won’t let him. He bails on her as soon as it’s polite, claiming not to feel well and rescheduling for next weekend, and heads to Star Labs because maybe in there they can puzzle out what was that about together.

Cisco and Caitlin are... bemused, is a word, except with some healthy concern thrown in, and a little disbelief. So they are on the same page as Barry, pretty much.

“I think,” Cisco tries, after they’ve silently stared at each other for a while. “I think it’s not about wanting to be chased. I think it’s knowing he’s going to be chased anyway by the police, and preferring it be by you.”

“We know he loves a challenge,” Caitlin adds.

“And that he’s  _obsessed_ with the Flash.”

Barry shakes his head. “Okay, but Bea and Ralph are challenging. At least they have been doing a pretty decent job of keeping him in check. It’s not much less than what I do, and I thought his deal with me is that I’m the biggest threat to him. It should stand for them too.”

“Maybe he’s offended,” Caitlin offers. “You are the senior crime fighter, and you have been chasing other criminals. Just not him or his team. Perhaps he’s taking an issue with being grouped with the regular crooks.”

“So like him,” Cisco agrees.

“I guess that makes a kind of sense…”

“Hey!” Bea’s voice calls from the entrance hallway. “Your favorite new hero is here! And I come bearing gifts.”

She comes into view, green hair pulled up into a ponytail, wearing a loose crop top and sports leggings, sowing she came to train, but she doesn’t look like someone about to exercise; she looks like a model posing in a magazine  _about_  exercise. She probably considers it her sloppy look. There’s a simple envelope in her hand.

Cisco mentions it first. “What’s that?”

“Don’t know. Came in, saw the mailman at the door looking lost. We should put up a mailbox, by the way. Offered to bring it in myself.”

“How did you explain being here?” Caitlin asks, and Bea’s grin turns sly.

“I told him I was being studied by science because no one believed someone like me could exist. He gave me his number,” she fluffs her hair and tosses Barry the letter. It has no sender or return address or anything at all except the Star Labs address. It’s stained, however, with dusty black marks, like the sender’s hands were dirty with soot. “What’s it about, by the way? Are we getting billed?”

“It could be a threat,” Caitlin points out. “It could have something inside.”

Bea raises a brow. “Like what? A bomb?”

“Or a virus. It’s not impossible.”

“Maybe we should scan it,” Cisco tries to take the letter, but Barry is already opening it. He has a feeling it’s not about any of that, thought if he’s right, it’s plenty bad, though in a different way.

_Flash + team,_

_Ignore him, he’s an idiot. Let Fire on the job._

_HW_

Cisco reads it over his shoulder. “The fuck?”

“So are we going to die or…?”

“No,” Barry answers Bea, handing her the letter. “But it seems you have a fan.”

He briefly gives her the context.

“Aw,  _que meigo,”_ She fans herself with the letter, beaming. “I’m keeping this.”

It would have been lovely if that had been the end of it, but Barry’s life is never lovely and things never end at a reasonable point, so obviously it’s Ralph who swaggers in hours later with his own unmarked envelope, this one so pristine and written in such nice calligraphy Barry wouldn’t be surprised if it were perfumed, claiming to have found it stuck between the bars of the main gate.

_If we’re voting for squad formation now, I want in. Get rid of the doofus, first thing._

“Is that about me?!” Ralph complains, and Bea laughs at him.

But Barry, Cisco and Caitlin don’t join in. Maybe it’s because they’ve dealt with the Rogues longer, and had worse experiences, but they can’t brush off their sudden odd behavior as easily. Instead they stare at the letter for a long moment, and then at each other for another.

“How are they even finding time to do this?” Caitlin asks. “This last one was probably delivered personally.”

Barry shakes his head. “What I want to know is why we don’t have alarms in the gate to let us know when someone is coming.”

“We  _do_ have alarms,” Cisco argues. “ _And_ cameras. What _I_ want to know is how she’s dodging them. I checked the feed; you can see the mailman man, then nothing, then the letter appears, then Ralph. You never actually  _see_ her do it,” he waves his hands. “We’re not supposed to have blind spots.”

“That’s a possible security breach,” Caitlin says.

“I know. I’m gonna look into it right now,” he meets Barry’s eyes and shrugs. “But for the other problem, I don’t know what to do. I guess… go home and sleep it off?”

It sounds like the only viable solution, so Barry accepts it and leaves them, promising to return the next day.

                                               

 

Except he can’t sleep.

Typical.  

 

 _hey,_ he texts Oliver around 3:30,  _did it ever happen of like, one of your villains get upset because someone else is arresting them and not u? and lets you know about it?_

 _Your relationship with your criminals concerns me,_ Oliver replies, and that is that.

                                                

 

Two days later, the weirdness has not been made worse but it’s also not out of his mind, and Barry finds himself over analyzing it as he picks healthy oranges in the supermarket.

He’s so distracted he almost doesn’t notice the presence behind him, until the person leans in so close to reach for a fruit that it’s rude, between strangers in a public place.

For some reason he’s surprised to find they’re not really strangers. He’s a fool, clearly.

“Seriously?” He asks in a defeated tone. “My own supermarket?”

“I was serious the first time,” Snart tells him, still absurdly close. “Ignore Mick and my sister. They have no sense of boundaries.”

Barry snorts.

“Right,” he says sarcastically. “ _They_ don’t. Wait,” he suddenly realizes. “Is this your way of telling me you’re pulling a job soon?”

Snart says nothing.

“Do you not know how your job works?”

“Why? Do you want me to be a better criminal?”

“That’s not what I sad!”  _I think._ “But, really, this is weird. Is this why you started pulling so many jobs this month?”

That earns his a disdainful look. “You’re only realizing this  _now?”_

Barry shakes his head, disbelieving. “Christ, if you wanted my presence so much it would be easier to ask me out.”

There’s a moment of awful silence where he just stares into Cold’s eyes and slowly realizes what he said, and how it could be taken.

“That’s not what I meant. That’s not what I meant at  _all_. I was making a commentary about your dependency, because honestly you should look into that, and I meant it as in”

“Okay.”

“–call me to the scene directly– What?”

“I’ll pick you up at eight,” the older man tells him, leaning close again to toss the orange back in the crate, and gives him one last smirk before sauntering off.

Barry is left gaping.

For a few years, possibly.

“The universe is broken,” he mutters, and a long haired man beside him nods and says ‘amen, brother’.

Barry wonders how to break it to Joe he finally got that date and also a dangerous wanted criminal would be dropping by, maybe he shouldn’t shoot him on sight.

He gets nothing, but he does decide never to pass work along ever again.the benefits don't outweigh the costs.  

**Author's Note:**

> originally posted on my [ tumblr ](http://tamirthegreat.tumblr.com/)


End file.
